Mysterious Glow

Uri Geller is back in the news claiming two things. First he claims that he put his friend, Michael Jackson, under hypnosis and asked him if the unsavory allegations against him were true, and was satisfied that Michael was innocent of the charges. Secondly, he claims that he hid drugs from Michael. The two were very good friends, for a time, but Uri Geller is such a, what can be charitably called, exaggerator, that every thing he says should be taken with a grain of salt.

For those of us who grew up in the 1970s, Uri Geller was an incredible phenomenon. He was a magician who packaged the trick of bending spoons as proof of amazing mental powers. I remember trying to bend spoons, forks and keys with just the power of the mind. It didn’t work. Uri only recently has dropped the claim that he was using supernatural powers given to him by extraterrestrials to do this. I still think he is one of the greatest magicians of the 20th century, and it doesn’t matter to me if he was a con artist or not.

For my own act, I’m doing spoon and fork bending with fake mental powers, but I worry if that can be seen from the stage.

In case no one has told you this, let me be the first to give you some quick advice that you can start applying to your life right now.

Please avoid those who are easily ‘offended’ by this or that. Instead seek the company of those who are amused.

Secondly, avoid those who are always bored and full of ennui. These buzz-kills don’t know how to have a good time. Instead, seek out those people who are always delighted and enchanted by the world.

That’s all. Be amused and delighted by everything and seek others like this.

There is an interesting article in the Telegraph which talks of the curious Chinese practice of “ghost brides.”

Five people have been arrested in China for digging up the corpse of a young woman to be a “ghost bride” for a man killed in a car crash.

…

The suspects included a grieving father who allegedly paid his four accomplices around £2,700 pounds to find a female to be his son’s companion in the afterlife.

The men were caught after unearthing the remains of a teenage girl who had poisoned herself after failing her university entrance exams last year, a newspaper in Xianyang in China’s Shaanxi province reported.

As strange as this sounds, to me anyway, the article goes on to talk about a gang who killed girls to turn them into ghosts. This doesn’t make sense to me, considering the sheer amount of available girls from recorded and unrecorded history that really should be available for the newly arrived ghost to marry. Seems like there is no need to make some fresh ones.

The Chinese conception of an afterlife seems to this untrained eye to be pretty much a continuation of this one. Although, not as much fun. I think it is similar to what the Ancient Greeks thought of, that people don’t go to a place of leisure like the Christian heaven, or a hedonistic and sensual place like the Islamic afterlife, but kind of a sad and shadowy realm. It is no wonder that Chinese Emperors were interested in immortality.

At my Asian market, they sale . Hell Money. They are beautiful “fake” money with huge denominations of a billion ga-zillion dollars. The term “hell” is a mistranslation from Christian missionaries who said that people would “go to Hell when they die.” My Hell Money has that written on it, but I think I’ve seen new money with Heaven written on it. In any case, when a loved one dies, the money is reverently burned and that way this will give the person some spending money in the afterlife. Again, this is different from the Western idea, of a place of leisure. No Elysian Fields of wheat that comes up from the ground that doesn’t need to be tended. It is back to work for the Chinese ghost.

Since China has the nasty habit of aborting all female babies in the womb, I wonder if they will extend the practice of Ghost Brides a bit further. In other words, China will soon run out of living girls for living guys to marry. Men will have to start marrying ghosts in the future.

In the future, Ghost Wives will say things like this complete with woooo-ing ghost noises:

“Wooooo woooo! woooo! Pick up your shoes out of the living room please wooooo!”

“Get off my back! I work hard in the fields all day and you just criticize everything I do!”

“woooWOOOOwooo You really embarrassed me at my ghost sister’s house last night.”

And so on.

I think the forces of reason are starting to win over the anti-vax crowd. Newsweek did a scathing critique of the pseudo-science of Sisters Grim, Oprah and Jenny McCarthy. I still understand that people still won’t listen to medical science, with its complicated answers. Celebrities still hold sway over all areas of expertise.

So it with this in mind that I point you in the direction of of Road Dahl. Maybe not as famous as Jenny McCarthy or Jim Carey, but he wrote Willie Wonka, and that should be enough credentials for the celebrity worshiping public. However, this time, a celebrity makes total, reasoned, sense.

From the brief article:

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy, ” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered.

Here is a good interview of magician/mentalist Derren Brown.

A couple of hours later, Brown sounds a tiny bit croaky but looks anything but embarrassed as he performs the hell out of his latest mix of “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship”. As with his three previous live shows, he reads audience member’s minds and even attempts to put us all into a trance. He ends, as ever, with a feat that makes you realise that even the most casual look and comment has been there for a reason. It’s so satisfyingly mind-melting that you come out of the theatre longing to shout about it — and then remember that you’ve all been sworn to secrecy. Well, fair enough. Take the surprises out of magic and what is left of it?

Hence, perhaps, Brown’s moments of self-doubt. He is, at 38, a magician so ingenious that he’s even persuaded us that he’s not a magician. He performs “psychological illusions” that emphasise the strange machinations of the human mind, not the nimbleness of his sleight-of-hand. He shows us the ways in which we get befuddled and duped, even as he befuddles and dupes us. It’s quite a trick. But is that all it is?

“One of the problems with magic,” Brown says a few days later, his voice medicated back to its normal easy clarity, “is that it’s such a fascinating thing to do, but all the things that are genuinely interesting about it are things you can’t really talk about. You have to hold so much back. So because people know they’re being fooled and it’s just a game, after a while the act begins to grate. Which is why most magicians are loved for a while and then become figures of fun.”

I’ve read his book, Absolute Magic, a few years ago. It is not something one can get in a bookstore, as it an insider’s book. Not really a listing of tricks and such. I felt like I was getting into the mind of the real Derren Brown. There was a biting snark to it, which kind of came across as mean-spirited. A lot of British people seem to have this. This is in stark contrast to the stage persona of Derren Brown who comes across as instantly likable. Anyway, it is one of the best books I’ve read on the performance of magic.

I wish that Derren Brown was the “face” of magic, rather than those who are more interested in endurance records and what-not. I suppose that endurance stunts have some kind of historical merit. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly was a boxer of such non-talent, that he started the craze of flagpole sitting, which is the kind of act David Blaine is doing now. Not very magical, and there really is no point or story to it. Shipwreck Kelly died homeless and penniless. Just saying.

I just read an interesting article on MSNBC about rapper, Kanye West’s book. It is a mere 52 pages, I wonder if that is in honor of a deck of playing cards, which would contain as much wisdom and erudition as anything Mr. West could write.

Kanye is proud to be a “non-reader” and the article quotes him as saying:

West’s derision of books comes despite the fact that his late mother, Donda West, was a university English professor before she retired to manage his music career. She died in 2007 of complications following cosmetic surgery.

“Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed,” West said. “I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.

“I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life,” he said.

West, a college dropout, said being a non-reader was helpful when he wrote his book because it gave him “a childlike purity.”

What is almost funny about this “book” is that many of the pages are blank. Also, I noticed that he had help writing it. Each page is like a zen koan with bits of wisdom like, “I hate the word hate.”

It is about time we stop praising Kanye West for his “talents.” He believes his own hype and in his narcissism thinks he can write a book just by having his influence and money get the thing published. I also hear he likes fish sticks.

It is with a heavy heart that I report that one of my lifelong heroes, the legendary Dai Vernon, has passed away. I’m an amateur magician, and watching old films of Dai Vernon makes my jaw drop. Vernon once fooled escape artist, Harry Houdini, with his ambitious card routine. His influence on magic is enormous, and it is Vernon who thought up most of the great tricks of the 20th century. It is my understanding that he never had an agent, and perhaps his lack of fame was a choice.

I’m not ashamed to say my version of the classic trick, Cups and Balls, is inspired from his routine, as well as his protegé, Michael Ammar. I know it by heart but it still fools me when Vernon does it. His performance of linking rings has a quiet beauty and elegance to it.

Vernon also mentored other magicians throughout his life, including my favorite, Ricky Jay. Ricky Jay is more famous to most people for his appearances in the television series, Deadwood, and the film Boogie Nights, but he is really one of the top card magicians in the world, as that link shows.

Vernon died at the age of 98.

When I was a teenager, experimenting with alcohol, there was a drinking board game that I liked, called Passout. You would roll dice and tramp around the board, and drink when it told you to. Unlike today, with my iron liver, I was a lightweight in those days, and I can’t remember how many times I went around the board- not that many. We had the good sense to only do shot glasses of beer, and so we didn’t have to suffer through that annoying alcohol poisoning, which can really cramp your style.

So, I was reminded of Passout, when I saw this board game, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This looks more like an art project and the price tag is pretty steep. It comes in a suitcase, well-organized and color coded with pill bottles and flasks, which you fill with the drugs and alcohol Hunter and his Samoan attorney took. How one would find exotic chemicals like 5-MEO-DMT ,which comes from cane toad venom of all things, 2C-E, and other alphabet drugs I’ve never heard of, to play the game is beyond me.

The rules state to play the game you need a sitter, who also functions as a driver. This person does not participate in the game. To play the game each contestant needs a weekend, and I imagine that it is a full 48 hours of this insanity. In some ways, it becomes a Live Action Role Playing game or LARP. Playing a LARP shouldn’t kill you, this very well might. But unlike any LARP I’ve ever heard of, there are game cards which are drawn, which say things like Go to a Carnival. I’ve never played a LARP, other than working at a Renaissance Faire which I think counts, and I thought a LARP was just a version of playing “let’s pretend” for grown-ups. I don’t know if Vampire: The Masquerade makes you use cards to resolve combat situations, but I do know you aren’t allowed to really bite people. Some people have taken LARP-ing too far, and confused it for the real world.

Playing Passout, one might find themselves in the emergency room, having their stomachs pumped. To play this game, one might just turn up in a morgue. I guess one could play the game with different colored jelly beans, confectioner’s sugar and lemonade. But I would still be worried about developing diabetes from it.

An interesting art project, but if you were to actually play this, you would get arrested or worse!

UPDATE: After looking at this more carefully, I’m sad to say, that no criminal accountability will happen.

After seeing a few articles in the today’s press, I’m hopeful that there may be a kind of justice for abuse victims of the Magdalene Asylums and other Irish reform schools, which were really prisons whose unstated goal was to abuse and harm as many children as possible.

To call this a “scandal” is an understatement. What happened in these “schools” is a crime against humanity.

I first became aware of this issue,when I saw the documentary, with the unnecessarily prurient title, Sex in a Cold Climate. These atrocities committed on these youngsters and teenagers have nothing to do with sex at all. The documentary chronicles the lives and abuse of unwed mothers who were forced to work in Magdalene laundries. They were veritable slaves, and their lives were made miserable by the physical and sexual abuse of the clergy that ran the place. Some of it so vile, that I feel uncomfortable describing what they did to these kids. These nuns and priests were really some of the worst people to ever be alive in the 20th century, and are on par with concentration camp guards, for that is what they were.

Magdalene Asylums were ostensibly created to help unwed mothers, but they were really a vehicle for forced labor. If a girl was suspected of being promiscuous she might wind up there. Sometimes, a girl in Ireland could be arrested just for being pretty and thrown in one of these work prisons. Many women never got out of these prisons.

There was a very good film called The Magdalene Sisters, which is about this terrible mark on Irish history. An excellent film, but some have criticized it for actually downplaying the abuse these girls endured. As bad as the abuse in that film is, the previously mentioned documentary does not skirt the issue at all.

I don’t want to discuss the theological implications of this, but no one can argue that the events in these reform schools were somehow even remotely divinely inspired.

I entered a fantasy art contest a few weeks ago. I wanted to enter since Erol Otus was the judge. I think Erol Otus was the absolute best of the old-school Dungeons and Dragons artists. There is something both menacing and beautiful about his work. It is kind of cartoony, but the grinning things Otus illustrated really fired my imagination, and stylistically, are absolutely unique.

For the contest, to make the deadline, I spruced up some old work of mine, and sent it off. He had this to say about my painting of a trio of adventurers going through a flooded dungeon.

“Perhaps the most doomed of all the adventurers pictured in the contest. Yeah, I know, the guys being eaten by the hydra and crushed by the cyclops are in bad shape but these guys just seem really doomed.”

This fills me with pride.

Please note: I’m actually kind of sensitive about my artwork, and I forgive me if I don’t provide an image.